ON THE TRAIL OF MENGELE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404200026-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 26
• Publication Date: March 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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O PAGE -Al
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!WASHINGTON POST
8 ". a r c h 1985
On the
By Art Harris
Washmglon Pusl Staff W,
Tales of the Angel of Death. told over and over: they
come irorn Auschwitz. from the jungles of South America,
from CIA files. from fevered Nazi-struck imaginations. from
hucksters of hellish relics. Somehow, they are all different,
but all the same.
Take the woman in the jewelry store in Asuncion, Par-
aguay. She told an Israeli'official about the day in 1965 when
a customer asked about some merchandise. She came around
the counter. She saw Josef Mengele. Two decades before,
trim and elegant in his sleek black SS uniform, he had per-
sonally dispatched 400,000 other Jews to the ovens with a
flick of his black-gloved wrist. But not her. She'd survived.
And now he was browsing in her jewelry store, just one of
40,000 Germans living in Paraguay.
She could not speak, she would say later. She watched
him leave and then she told her husband: "It was him. It was
Mengele."
For 40 years, one of the monsters of history )ias wandered
the globe untouched, a free man: the most notorious Nazi
war criminal believed alive today, the' Auschwitz doctor
whose mass -murders and grisly experiments evoke Evil In-
carnate.
How can. this be?
West Germany h2s had a warrant out for his arrest for 26
years and has added a $350.000 reward. Israeli Nazi hunters
spirited Adolf Eichmann out of Argentina, but others have
missed Mengele, they say, by minutes at a Paraguayan hotel,
by little more at the Rome airport. CIA informants put him in
Brazil, in Chile. in the drug trade or working as an auto me-
chanic. German prosecutors believe he may have been in
Paraguay as late as 1982, if a jailed drug suspect can be be-
STAT
lieved: He is said to have been Mengele's roommate outside
Asuncion, where they shared a passion for beekeeping.
What's more, the sightings began as soon as the Third
Reich fell: American GIs say they saw him in an Army prison;
a German professor claims he interviewed Mengele at a Brit-
ish prison camp in 1947. After that Mengele lived in his
home town in Bavaria, where his family had made its fortune
in the farm machinery business. His name arose at the Nu-
remberg war-crime trials, and he fled to Rome, where he is
said to have gotten papers under the name of Gregorio Gre-
gori.
In either 1949 or 1951, according to conflicting reports,
he sailed from Italy to Argentina, where he lived under his
own-name in Buenos Aires, hawking heavy equipment for the
family firm. Neighbors say he was "quiet, distinguished and
courteous."
As Dr. Helmut Gregor. one of the dozen aliases he adopted
over the years, he became an Argen-
tine citizen in 1954 and-performed
abortions, says Nazi hunter Simon
Wiesenthal. (At one point, he was
"detained" by police when a patient
died.) His first wife divorced him that
year, and in 1958 he married his old-
er brother's widow. They were di-
vorced three years later, and she left
for Switzerland and Italy. After the
West German warrant was issued in
1959 he became a Paraguayan cit-
izen; he-is said to have attended his
father's funeral in Germany that
year.
He has lived his life. He has had
friends, patients, family. Now bounty
hunters, revenge seekers, glory
hounds and die-hard believers in
earthly justice descend on South
America in such numbers that they
have fostered a trade in relics of this
saint . of Hell-photographs, an ID
card, whatever souvenir of evil you
want, except the man himself.
Cat, r, uld
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? ?j
If alive, he would be 74 this month.
Now America wants him. Its top
Nazi hunter, Neal Sher, a Justice De-
partine:tt lawyer who heads the Of-
`i-_-
of Special Investigations, flew to
E= op-- last week to seek leads from
German prosecutors and Nazi track-
ers Iile Wiesenthal, 76, who suspect
Mengele is still in Paraguay, pro-
tected by President Alfredo Stroess-
ner; but after all these years, they
still don't really know.
On his SS application, he said he
stood 5 feet 9, with brown hair and
blue eyes. But others remember a
shorter, darker-looking man in a
country that worshipped blue-eyed
blonds- Mengele's hang-up was that
he "looked like a Gypsy," says Wie-
senthal.
Ei~ cERPT ED
LLteltieence tips put Mengele in
Chile 18 months ago; in Paraguay's
German-soeaking Mennonite villages
on the Bolivian border as recently as
last year: in Uruguay six months ago.
South American governments;
rubbed raw by complaints that
they're sheltering the fled legions of
the Nazis. deny it al L
Says the Chilean Embassy press
officer. "We had one Nazi war crim-
inal, and that was plenty." That would
have been the late Walter Rauff, the
SS general who conceived and oper-
ated mobile. gas chambers used to
exterminate Jews. He recently died
in his sleep after running a fishing
boat for .years, under his own name,
out of Puerto Provenir. Chile's su-
preme court denied his extradition
request on a technicality. Another
extradition request was denied in
1959 by Argentina, on grounds that
it was written in German, not Span-
ish. And not till 1970 did Paraguay
concede Mengele had been natural-
ized years before.
"The last photograph is 1963 in
Asuncion," says Wiesenthal by phone
from Vienna. "We don't know his
[new] alias."
What of rumors he may have und-
ergone plastic surgery? Wiesenthal
doubts it; no Nazi war criminal he
caught ever went under the knife.
What about the report of postcards
sent to friends from Portugal? Does
Wiesenthal say this is a Nazi disin-
formation trick to blur the trail?
Or CIA files port raying Mengele as
a cocaine warlord dealing under the
name 'Jr. Hennaue Wollm n7 "A stu-
ptd story." Wiesenthal scoffs. "He
doesn't need the money "
It would certainly seem that way,
if he can rely on rich Nazi friends and
the family conglomerate, Karl Men-
gele & Sons, with offices in Para-
guay, Argentina and the United
States.
A $1 million bounty was offered
last week by unnamed donors in Los
Angeles after lesser amounts did no
good.
He remains at bay, a fugitive with
all. the glamor of an emissary from
hell, merely yapped at by the hounds
of justice, and mythologized by Hol-
lywood in two movies, "Marathon
Man" and "The Boys From Brazil."
* * * * *. X
-~~CElz?~1:.L
"This here's the bastard who ster-
ilized 3,000 women at Auschwitz,"
said one, as a man fitting Mengele's
description huffed and puffed. Kemp-
thorne was 19, a private at the Idar-
Oberstein detention camp in occupied
Germany, where Nazis were inter-
rogated after the war.
Guards sometimes trotted them
outside for fun and games, including a
charade called "Luftwaffe": Prisoners
were ordered to run around in circles
"spitting like a plane," says Richard
Schwarz, 59, a retired government
labor lawyer in Washington, D.C. As
a young private, he put a Nazi he now
believes was Mengele through the
drill, "pats on the fanny" and all.
"Presumably, it was Mengele,"
recalls Schwarz, who never heard the
man's name, but has war correspond-
ence indicating, he wrote friends
(_about just such a doctor. And the Si-
mon Wiesenthal Center in Los An-
geles, which hunts data on Nazi war
criminals and supports Holocaust
studies, turned up the two soldiers,
along with a U.S. Army dispatch from
an intelligence officer who refers to
an account of Mengele's arrest in
1947.
"We're searching our records of
that camp," says Lt. Col. Craig
McNab, an Army spokesman.
"You've got to understand, Mengele
wasn't on top of anyone's list back
then. In 1945, he was a doctor way
off in the wilds of Poland."
And by the 1950s, he was long
gone. In South America, the chase
began, a slow and frustrating pursuit.
Diplomatic channels yielded nothing.
Everything grew vague. I
* * * * * *
EXCERPTED
Agents kept up their search in
Asuncion and the interior, then lost
1V,en ele across the border in Brazil,
according to eavily edited CIA tles
re eased last week. Accounts also
surfaced of assorted avengers on the
loose, and someone apparently mis-
took a man for Mengele. He was
found beaten to death, but it turned
out to be an ex-Nazi soldier.
Diplomacy offered another route
'for frustration. When West Ger-
many's envoy protested in 1965 that
Mengele's citizenship was invalid,
Stroessner is said to have exploded in
rage. "Once a Paraguayan, always a
Paraguayan!" he shouted, pounding
the table.
Especially when the citizenship
papers are signed by old Stroessner
friends like Alejandro von Eckstein, a
Russian emigre`who fought alongside
Stroessner in the Chaco War with
Bolivia, and who still advises
Paraguayan intelligence services.
At the American Embassy at
Asuncion, there were frequent ru-
mors of Martin Bormann alive and
well, but never Mengele, recalls A.
Dane Bowen, political officer until
1964. Besides: "Hunting Nazi war
criminals wasn't our big preoccupa-
tion."
In those days, Mengele lived open-
ly, sunning at a villa a half-mile from
the embassy and scouting for land in
Alta Parana; just across the Argen-
tine border, reportedly working as an
auto mechanic northeast of Asuncion
near the Brazilian border. "Recurring
rumors" said that Mengele was at a
"well-guarded ranch, either near ? n-
carnacion, in eastern araguav or in
Chaco. and that he is protecte y
Stroessner," said a 1972 CIA report.
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Later, in 1978, the U.S. Embassy
heard he frequented the Caballo
Bianco, or White Horse, a favorite
German restaurant downtown. And a
BBC crew with a hidden mike cap-
ture. a Nazi boasting of playing cards
u:h the doctor.
`?~iengele? Oh, yes, he's around,
but we don't know quite where. He
comes and goes," officials would reply
whenever Ambassador Robert White
brought it up.
So, why wasn't he arrested-or
something? "Because he wasn't
wanted all that much," says White,
who filed his Mengele tales with the
Sate Department and got no reply: I
"W'e did report on it, but there was
never much interest expressed by
Washington in any way."
Still, such accounts irritated offi-
cials in the remote haven for right-
wing refugees. "Bob, how can we pol-
ish up our image?" he was often
asked.
"A good place to start would be to
cancel Mengele's citizenship," he re-
plied. Then, one day, out of the blue,
the foreign minister said, "Bob, that's
a wonderful idea. I'll bring it up with
the president." And, in 1979, Men-
gele was stripped of his citizenship
for being "out of the country for more
than two years."
"We knew he was in Paraguay, but'
its not something we pursued; says
Alan Ryan, the top Nazi hunter for
the Justice Department until 1983.
There was no jurisdiction, and Ryan
was too busy chasing Nazi war crim-
inals hiding in America to go "smoke
him out of the jungle."
EXCERPTED
Now Mengele is hot, everyone's
favorite villain. It's only taken 40
years. In South America, there are
those who can look on it as a trend,
not unlike other trends, a sort of nos-
talgia craze.
"There are people out there willing
to sell you Bormann's bones and
Mengele's hacienda," says New York
lawyer Gerald Posner, whose re-
search forays draw Nazi brokers like
flies. "The minute they hear an
American is hunting Nazis, their ears
perk up and their wallets get itchy."
He's spurned diaries, rings and
memorabilia. How about Mengele's
original fingerprint card? asked a
Brazilian cop. Only $500: Or recent
photos, whispered an ex-Nazi officer
over mint tea at the Hotel Mansour
in Casablanca-after plastic surgery.
A mere five grand. Or, maybe you
like Mengele's SS ring, very cheap:
$1,000,-said the Argentine lawyer.
The flea market sells such rings by
the trayful, swastika and all, $3
apiece.
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